If you want to make a car spin in the air, compressed gas is a good way to do it.

Watch an exclusive clip from Super Scam Me where a victim tracks down her scammer.

Anthropic PBC signed its first data-center lease in Canada, agreeing to buy capacity at a new project that’s worth more than C$10 billion ($7.1 billion) in the eastern province of Nova Scotia.

The tool found the right passage but missed the mismatch, and the audit shows where rule-based checks break down. The post I Built a Claim-Checker for Writing With Codex. It Passed a Wrong Claim. appeared first on Towards Data Science.

The shocking arrest of a well-known ransomware negotiator reveals the critical need for vendor program oversight.

Christopher Thomas Mertens, a high school maintenance worker, was arrested after attempting to meet up with an AI persona that he thought was a 15 year old boy.

Andrew E. Freedman / Tom's Hardware: Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra review: powerful, useful Magnetic Connect port, bright screen, but heavy, loud, and Windows doesn't take advantage of RTX Spark  —  Useful for AI models, but still waiting for more Windows 11 features to take advantage of.  —  Reviews

Aaron Tilley / The Information: Sources: PayPal, Epic, and others voiced concerns to DOJ as it signaled a preference to settle its Apple antitrust suit with a deal focusing on interoperability  —  As the U.S. Department of Justice negotiates a settlement of its antitrust lawsuit against Apple, app developers are fretting …

Bloomberg: Organizers abruptly cancel 2026's Grace Hopper Celebration, one of the biggest events for women in tech, after sponsorships and registrations fall short  —  The cancellation of this year's Grace Hopper Celebration, one of the largest gatherings of women in technology, is the latest example …

Sometimes a paper emerges from the day's literature stream that really gets my blood up – not because it is inaccurate or offensive, but because it notices and studies something that has been annoying me at the periphery of my awareness for a long time, in a vague and non-specific way (perhaps because I was too busy to do anything but ignore it). Such a paper has come out today, from three authors at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. Titled Retrieved but Not Read…

As agents escape containment and access external systems, responsibility remains human. Accountability, however, is much less settled.

Apple Inc. said demand for the new iPhone Duo has been “nothing short of extraordinary” after shipping estimates slipped to the end of January of next year just minutes after pre-orders opened on Friday.

Lee Charlie/Shutterstock.com An AI system trained on photographs of the face and tongue correctly identified every patient with coronary heart disease (CHD) in a small test, according to a new study from China. The researchers recruited 518 people: 200 with diagnosed CHD and 318 healthy volunteers. Each had their face and tongue photographed with a purpose-built scanning system. The pictures were analysed using deep learning, a type of AI that learns to spot patterns in images. The system examined the tongue and face photographs separately, then combined what each had picked up to predict who had CHD. Using both together performed better than either alone. The best-performing version was 98% accurate in a test of 104 people, correctly identifying all 40 patients with CHD, although two healthy participants were wrongly classified as having the condition – so-called “false positives”. The AI focused on the centre of the tongue, its surface coating, the skin around the mouth and the cheeks. Some patients with CHD had darker tongues, thicker coatings or changes in facial pigmentation. The researchers say the areas highlighted by the AI are consistent with traditional Chinese medicine teachings about links between the tongue, face and heart. Reading disease from appearance is not unique to traditional Chinese medicine. Doctors have long recognised that some visible features can point to underlying medical problems. Blue lips can signal low oxygen levels in the blood, and fatty yellow deposits around the eyelids, known as xanthelasma, can point to very high cholesterol, often caused by an inherited condition. Coronary heart disease explained. Whether a tongue or a cheek can reveal blocked arteries is a different matter. Skin tone, lighting, age, medication and smoking all change how a face and tongue look, and the study does not establish that these features are caused by blocked coronary arteries. AI may pick up associations that humans struggle to recognise, but that does not explain what causes them. CHD develops when the arteries supplying the heart muscle narrow because of fatty deposits called plaques, a process known as atherosclerosis. This restricts blood flow and can eventually cause a heart attack. For many people, the first sign of a problem is chest pain, a heart attack or another life-threatening event, so spotting the disease earlier is an important goal of preventive medicine. Doctors currently estimate risk using factors including age, smoking, blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes. If CHD is suspected, tests can include an electrocardiogram (ECG), blood tests or specialised scans. A quick, painless, low-cost photographic test could help decide who needs those investigations, particularly in communities where access to specialist healthcare is limited. A promising result, with questions remaining The study, published in Scientific Reports, compared people already diagnosed with CHD against healthy volunteers, which is very different from screening the general public, where people have a mix of other illnesses and levels of cardiovascular risk. The photographs were also taken under controlled lighting with specialised equipment. The model has not been tested on people from other hospitals or settings. AI systems sometimes perform very well on the data used to build them but less well in different hospitals, ethnic groups or healthcare settings. Not all the healthy volunteers were assessed with coronary imaging, so undetected disease cannot be ruled out. The AI may also have been picking up differences linked to age, other illnesses or other characteristics of the participants rather than heart disease. Screening adds a further problem. Even a highly accurate test can produce large numbers of false-positive diagnoses when it is used on a population in which the disease is relatively uncommon. Larger studies following people over time would need to show whether this approach can pick up disease that has gone unnoticed, tell it apart from other conditions and lead to better health. Researchers would also need to compare it directly with existing ways of assessing risk. If it proves useful, it could eventually be used alongside standard heart disease risk checks, cholesterol tests and blood pressure measurements. David C. Gaze does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When ChatGPT became publicly available, educators began to imagine the worst-case scenario. Students would no longer write their own essays. Take-home assignments would become impossible to trust. And somewhere, an LLM would be producing a perfectly acceptable five-paragraph essay on The Great Gatsby while its supposed author played video games in another room. The concern was understandable. For the first time, students had free access to technology that could produce convincing written work…

Getting your data science code running anywhere The post Deploying Data Science Tools: Part 1 appeared first on Towards Data Science.

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NVIDIA on October 16, 2026, announced that RTX Spark laptops are available globally from ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI, with prices starting at $2,599 and software support at launch spanning local AI agents, creative applications and major games. The systems are sold through the manufacturers' websites and major retailers, with more systems to follow, and pricing and configurations differ by region. The launch lineup comprises the ASUS ProArt P14 and P16, Dell XPS 16, HP OmniBook…

Vietnam’s FPT now tests entry-level applicants on practical AI skills, but the company has yet to disclose how candidates will be evaluated. The post Vietnam’s FPT Adds AI Skills Test for New Hires, but Key Details Remain Unclear appeared first on TechRepublic.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Kids are outsmarting social media bans. That’s not a problem we need to solve.   —Michal Luria, Aliya Bhatia, and Danah Boyd Social media bans are stacking up. In July, France joined…

NVIDIA officially entered the Windows PC race this week, and its arrival brings a formidable new competitor to the premium AI PC market. With its RTX Spark platform, NVIDIA is bringing its Grace Arm CPU architecture, Blackwell GPU technology and extensive software ecosystem together in a new generation of Windows laptops. Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra is among the first systems to showcase this collaboration, leveraging NVIDIA’s tech and putting it squarely in competition with Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and even Apple for high-performance local AI and creation-optimized laptops. For Microsoft, the partnership expands the capabilities of Windows on Arm considerably, particularly for local AI development, content creation and other demanding professional workloads. Starting at $2,599.99, Surface Laptop Ultra is clearly a premium offering, but its combination of processing horsepower, large, unified memory capacity, and premium industrial design gives it an interesting position in the market. My personal testing suggests NVIDIA and Microsoft have delivered a compelling platform with strong AI throughput, graphics performance and competitive CPU compute. Just as importantly, the Surface Laptop Ultra offers a glimpse of how AI development and local AI agent workflows could become more practical on a portable Windows PC. NVIDIA RTX Spark brings Grace Blackwell to Windows on Arm At the heart of Surface Laptop Ultra is NVIDIA’s RTX Spark N1X SoC, combining up to 20 Grace Arm CPU cores with a Blackwell GPU featuring up to 6,144 CUDA cores. Configurations support up to 128GB of unified memory, shared between CPU and GPU. The Surface Laptop Ultra model I tested has this full-fat configuration with an eye-watering $5,899.99 price tag (thanks, memory crunch), though there are lower-cost base configs as noted previously, offering an 18-core CPU with a 5,120-core GPU and 24GB of unified memory. NVIDIA and Microsoft Regardless, this architecture is particularly powerful for running on-device AI. Rather than being constrained by the dedicated graphics memory found in conventional laptops with discrete GPUs, RTX Spark can make a much larger pool of memory available to GPU-accelerated applications. This allows larger language models, longer context windows and demanding inference workloads to run locally. It’s similar in design to AMD’s Ryzen AI Max series, aka Strix Halo, in that regard, but with a more potent GPU engine on board. NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem is another important advantage. Developers can leverage familiar tools including TensorRT, PyTorch and llama.cpp, with a base software foundation that also extends into NVIDIA-powered workstations and data center infrastructure. For organizations building AI applications, this offers a solid development path. Models and workflows can be prototyped locally before moving to larger systems, reducing cloud compute and token expense while allowing sensitive data to remain on-device. (See: Around the corner: Agentic AI PCs that cut token costs.) Microsoft has also optimized Windows 11 for RTX Spark, with improvements to workload scheduling, power management, memory allocation and application compatibility. These platform-level investments were essential to making NVIDIA’s Arm architecture practical for everyday Windows computing, and I was able to put some of them to the test in the few days I’ve had the machine on hand. Surface Laptop Ultra: Premium design meets practical function Microsoft has given RTX Spark an appropriately premium home with this machine. The Surface Laptop Ultra features a 15-inch PixelSense Ultra mini-LED touch display with up to 2,000 nits of claimed peak HDR brightness, a 120Hz refresh rate and excellent potential for creative work requiring high accuracy and wide gamut coverage. Dave Altavilla The machine’s aluminum chassis is less than 18 mm thick, and it weighs in at under 4.5 pounds. It’s not an ultraportable per se, but considering the horsepower on board, Microsoft has struck a reasonable balance between portability and performance. The design is refreshingly understated, with clean lines and rigid aluminum construction. My initial hands-on impressions have been particularly positive, thanks to the keyboard’s tactile response, smooth and responsive haptic touchpad, and bright, high-contrast display. The larger touchpad should be especially welcome for users navigating complex applications, while the touchscreen adds flexibility for reviewing documents, annotating designs, and interacting directly with creative content. Connectivity options are also very good, relative to other premium laptops. Microsoft includes three USB-C ports, HDMI, USB-A, an SD card reader and a headphone jack. One USB-C connection features Microsoft’s new magnetic charging mechanism, combining the convenience and safety of a breakaway power connector with the versatility of a standard USB-C port. Microsoft has also designed the cooling system with large fans and significant thermal capacity, while making the machine’s internal SSD removable and offering good internal serviceability in general. These are practical considerations for professional users and IT departments concerned with reliability, maintenance and long-term ownership. Battery life and sustained performance under prolonged workloads are important aspects Microsoft focused on for the overall experience, particularly for a machine designed to deliver workstation-class capabilities away from a desk. More on this shortly. Local AI agents: Moving from inference to action RTX Spark also supports locally running autonomous AI agents, including one that I tested out called Hermes, which can execute multi-step workflows, access files and interact with applications. Its potential impact spans software development, research, document analysis, business automation and many other disciplines. Hermes provides the agent framework, while supported models leverage RTX Spark’s CUDA-accelerated inference and unified memory. For businesses, local agents can keep sensitive data on-device and reduce cloud inference costs, provided they’re configured appropriately. However, granting agents access to files, code execution and corporate systems introduces security risks. Microsoft’s Execution Containers and NVIDIA’s OpenShell aim to provide isolation and access controls, though their effectiveness depends on proper enterprise policy implementation. Hermes running Qwen3.8-27B locally on Surface Laptop Ultra, generating a benchmark report. Dave Altavilla To test this capability, I ran Hermes with the Qwen3.8-27B language model locally on the Surface Laptop Ultra. I asked it to extract benchmark charts from an Excel spreadsheet and create a formatted Word report with performance commentary. Hermes autonomously generated and executed Python scripts, processed the spreadsheet and assembled the document in approximately five minutes. Color me impressed. That’s a respectable turnaround for a task requiring several manual steps. My results demonstrate how local AI agents can streamline reporting and analysis without cloud-hosted model inference. Human review remains essential, but this was a promising demonstration of practical, real-world agentic AI on a Windows laptop. AI performance: Strong results as expected My team’s preliminary AI benchmarks highlight the advantages of NVIDIA’s RTX Spark architecture. However, we’re still digging deeper into AI-enabled use cases and performance. In UL Procyon’s AI Text Generation benchmark using Phi 3.5, a family of lightweight, open-source small language models (SLMs) released by Microsoft, the Surface Laptop Ultra scored 2,703, compared with 2,027 for Lenovo’s Intel Core Ultra X9 388H-powered IdeaPad Pro 5, an advantage of approximately 33%. Dave Altavilla The difference was even more substantial in MLPerf’s Flux 2 Klein 4B image generation workload, where the Surface Laptop Ultra delivered 26.97 images per minute versus 9.96 for the Lenovo machine, or roughly 2.7 times the throughput. These results demonstrate the platform’s potential for accelerating local inference, image generation, agentic workflows and other AI workloads. Actual application performance will depend on model selection, software optimization and available system memory, though NVIDIA does provide a nice memory partitioning tool in the NVIDIA App for Windows. Content creation, gaming and battery life: Blackwell’s versatility RTX Spark’s Blackwell GPU delivers impressive graphics performance, extending the Surface Laptop Ultra’s capabilities beyond AI development and everyday creation or productivity tasks. Dave Altavilla In 3DMark Steel Nomad Lite, the Surface Laptop Ultra achieved 98.29 FPS, more than double the 46.07 FPS of Lenovo’s Core Ultra X9-powered IdeaPad Pro 5. In the ray-tracing-focused 3DMark Speed Way test, it delivered 30.31 FPS versus 19.72 FPS for the ASUS ROG Flow Z13, powered by AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 and Radeon 8060S graphics. Dave Altavilla Actual gaming performance was similarly strong. In Cyberpunk 2077, the Surface Laptop Ultra averaged 71.05 FPS, ahead of the ROG Flow Z13’s 63.76 FPS. However, the AMD system narrowly led in The Talos Principle 2, delivering 89.5 FPS versus the Surface’s 84.5 FPS at 1080p medium settings. CPU performance for tasks like 3D rendering also holds up well. In Cinebench 2026, the Surface scored 6,787 in the multi-threaded test, edging out the AMD-powered ROG Flow Z13’s 6,546. Notably, the Surface retained 99% of its multi-threaded performance on battery power as well. For creative professionals, native Arm applications including Blender, DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Photoshop offer opportunities to leverage RTX Spark’s potent GPU. However, Windows on Arm compatibility remains a consideration. Microsoft’s Prism translation supports many x86 applications, but specialized software, drivers and certain games (like EA anti-cheat-supported titles currently) may still encounter limitations. Dave Altavilla Battery endurance was respectable for the Surface Laptop Ultra, at 14 hours and 35 minutes in my PCMark video playback testing, though competing mainstream thin-and-light laptops lasted considerably longer. The Surface Laptop Ultra and RTX Spark operate within a different power envelope, however, more akin to a beefier gaming laptop, rather than a svelte 2 – 3-lb business machine. Final thoughts: A serious new AI Windows PC competitor The Surface Laptop Ultra marks an important milestone for NVIDIA’s expansion into Windows PCs and Microsoft’s ambitions for high-performance Arm-based computing. My initial testing shows the RTX Spark-powered Surface Laptop Ultra delivers exceptionally strong AI acceleration, competitive multi-threaded CPU performance and impressive graphics horsepower. Combined with Microsoft’s premium industrial design, extensive connectivity and I/O options, and Windows platform integration, RTX Spark makes a convincing first impression. Starting at $2,600, this is a specialized, premium system, and mainstream business users will find more economical alternatives to be sure. However, for developers (even vibe coders), creative professionals and organizations evaluating local AI workflows, the Surface Laptop Ultra offers a compelling combination of performance, beautiful industrial design, portability and local AI capability, especially with its higher-tier memory configurations. NVIDIA has arrived in the Windows PC market with serious technology, and Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Ultra is an impressive first showcase of what this new partnership can deliver.